We haven’t seen Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury in a long time, not since 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. But we do know that he’s filming Captain Marvel right now, which follows a younger Nick Fury in the 1990s. Could he possibly show in something more current to the MCU , like Avengers: Infinity War? It would be weird for him not to appear in the biggest Marvel movie ever, a culmination of ten years of films that Nick Fury has been integral in. But Jackson himself has said flatly that he does not have a role in it.
Well, that may or may not be true. Slashfilm and others have noticed on the film’s IMDB credits the names of two people who are very closely associated with Jackson. One is his stand-in Qualen Bradley, and the other is his make-up artist Jake Garber. Now, it’s possible they could be working on Infinity War for others. That’s not out of the realm of possibility. It’s also important to remember that anybody can edit IMDB listings. We could put Mickey Mouse up in there if we wanted. That said, I highly doubt anybody, including Marvel producers, would go to this length just to confuse us about Jackson’s casting.
UNLESS my theory about Captain Marvel turns out to be true, and that the Nick Fury we see isn’t actually Nick Fury but a shapeshifted Skrull. Then it might make some sense to keep an appearance by Jackson under wraps.
We’ll find out when Avengers: Infinity War opens April 27th.
While it may seem unfair, perhaps a little inflammatory, to compare the lawless political climate of The Purge movies to the current occupants of the White House, it doesn’t come from out of thin air. The hit Blumhouse horror franchise has always been overtly political, but with the latest film in the series, The First Purge, explicit comparisons to the Trump era were quite literally drawn.
And it continues in the new trailer for The First Purge, which is a prequel of sorts revealing how our country got so twisted that our government would sanction a 24-hour “holiday” in which all violent crime is legal. Franchise director James DeMonaco sticks around as screenwriter while the talented Gerard McMurray (Burning Sands) takes over behind the camera. Here’s the synopsis:
Behind every tradition lies a revolution. Next Independence Day, witness the rise of our country’s 12 hours of annual lawlessness. Welcome to the movement that began as a simple experiment: The First Purge.
To push the crime rate below one percent for the rest of the year, the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) test a sociological theory that vents aggression for one night in one isolated community. But when the violence of oppressors meets the rage of the marginalized, the contagion will explode from the trial-city borders and spread across the nation.
Marisa Tomei is the biggest name in a cast that includes Y’Lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, and Luna Lauren Velez. Celebrate your independence by checking out The First Purge on July 4th.
Hope in the wake of loss. Small towns coming together for
high school sports. Winning one for a fallen teammate. If these types of tropes
resonate with you when well executed, then you might just like The
Miracle Season, the new inspirational sports drama out this weekend,
because it hits them all with sincerity and hope. Honestly maybe a little too
much sincerity and hope for my taste. But I’m a jaded, bitter film critic, so
who knows. Maybe my heart’s just not quite warm enough.
Based on a tragic true story, the film follows a girls’
volleyball team trying to persevere and win the season after the loss of one of
their star players. Helen Hunt (as the team’s tough-love coach who struggles
to keep them together) and William Hurt (playing the late girl’s grieving
father) both give charismatic performances. They’re well cast, because with the
material they were given, lesser actors could have easily slipped into Lifetime
Original Movie-levels of simplistic sentimentality.
The town the characters occupy is united by high school
sports in a way that only really happens in movies. There’s a Friday
Night Lights quality to the town-wide love of girls’ volleyball that
just didn’t land for me. I know this is based on a true story, but the
townspeople and announcers were just a little too into this whole thing for me
to fully accept it as a reality. It’s also PG, which didn’t help the matter
either. Everyone is a model citizen on their best behavior all the time who
obsess over high school girls’ volleyball. It’s a little bit much.
Setting aside its heartstring-tugging clichés for a moment,
I did ultimately enjoy the movie as a whole. Miracle Season is very
well shot and edited. There’s a lot of great coverage of their games and
training. It’s no Rocky, but the montages are pretty cool nonetheless. Honestly,
my biggest problems lie with the script.
The ultimate point made in The Miracle Season is not
to live a life of grief in tribute to someone you lost, but rather to live a
full life inspired by how they lived theirs with the short time they had. The
only problem is that in dramatizing this event, we spend very few moments with
the girl before her untimely death. We mostly get to know her through her
friends and family’s reminiscences after she’s gone, which seems to be the
opposite of its moral. I just wish there was more time spent developing her as
a character before she was gone. More showing and less telling. Perhaps then
the message would have sunk in a little more.
Towards the end, the film does get repetitive. The games are
cool to watch, but not over and over again. I imagine even legit volleyball
fans would get tired by the fifth time we’re watching them toss the coin and
serve the first ball.
If you like a good sports movie, and you’re fine with it
being super sad and a little sappy, then The Miracle Season is right up your
alley. For me the fast pacing of the game sequences and solid performances were
enough to keep me onboard this emotional rollercoaster, even if it’s not one
I’d typically want to ride.
Karl Urban has starred in his share of comic book movies, from RED to Dredd to Thor: Ragnarok, and now he’s making the move to the small screen. Urban has been confirmed to star as Billy the Butcher in Amazon’s TV series adaptation of The Boys, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s superhero-skewering comic book.
Developed by Seth Rogen and Evan Golberg, The Boys is far from your average superhero story. While there are plenty of capes, they’re mostly portrayed as terrible, corrupt, abusive, people with serious psychological problems. That’s where The Boys come in. They’re a group of government sanctioned vigilantes charged with taking down costumed heroes who have embraced the darker sides of their celebrity. Turns out The Boys have some serious problems, too, and Billy the Butcher, the team’s leader, is the most disturbed of them all.
Urban joins Laz Alonso, Erin Moriarty, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Jessie T. Usher, Chace Crawford, Dominique McElligott, and Karen Fukuhara. The Boys is expected to premiere in 2019. [THR]
“I’m not going to be President”, a somber Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) tells his overlooked friend/cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) minutes after he escaped drowning in a car that had tumbled off of a bridge in the New England island of Chappaquiddick. Little did he know how accurate he would be. If his escape had been a harrowing tale of survival then maybe that could be spun into political gold, but instead the incident, which saw Kennedy’s loyal aide Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) die in those frigid waters, would become a scandal that dogged his career to the end.
John Curran’s film Chappaquiddick isn’t so much about the crash, those details are common knowledge and have been for decades. It’s a gripping and timely tale about the concoction of the story around the scandal, and the efforts by Kennedy, using the currency of his family legacy and a distracted public, to keep his reputation intact. This is a film about power, and how being born with the right name can be enough to reshape reality.
In the summer of ’69 Ted Kennedy is still in the earliest stages of his political career, but he’s already feeling the weight of his fallen brothers, Joe, President John F. Kennedy, and Bobby who would die just a year earlier. Ted’s the public face of the family now and is expected make a move for the White House , but at this point he’s undecided on a future path, despite the pressure put on him by his father (Bruce Dern). That weekend he’s hosting a “reunion” of loyal Kennedy staffers known as the “Boiler Room Girls”, all lovely single women of 28-years-old or younger, at an event in which the only other attendees are grabby married men, most of them Kennedys or Kennedy acolytes. Mary Jo is one of those campaign staffers and she was very close to Ted, some say too close, which only complicated matters when their late night drive ended up in tragedy. Once it happens and Ted is slow to alert the police, perhaps at the cost of Mary Jo’s life, the spin machine moves into place. But not before Ted, who is wholly unsuited to political maneuvering at this point, makes a number of bone-headed errors that must be cleaned up.
Curran gets a lot of material to work with here, and along with screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan he makes the most of it. While the actual direction of the film is purely functional, the parallels drawn to today and Clarke’s powerful performance are what make this such an engrossing story. I daresay Clarke is considerably more charismatic than Ted Kennedy was back then. It’s tough to reconcile the shifty Ted Kennedy of 1969 with the stoic champion of the working class that he would be throughout his senatorial career, but you have to understand going in that this is not a film meant to bolster his reputation. It leaves him pretty scarred up, as Ted continually puts his own concerns ahead of any true justice for Mary Jo. Even his decision to reveal that it was him behind the wheel is a calculated one meant to gain sympathy, although he persists in claims that he will always follow his “true north” and do what’s right. All women are given short shrift, not just Mary Jo. Olivia Thirlby plays Mary Jo’s best friend Rachel Schiff, but she’s barely given much to do other than be another of Kennedy’s loyalists. Disappointing as the portrayal of women may be, it’s a calculation that fits with the time and the all-male group of power players involved.
It’s also interesting the depiction of the news cycle and how easily it could be manipulated. While today we both love and lament the speed which stories are broken, there was no Internet back then. There weren’t dozens of news outlets picking apart every facet of the event. If Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick were to have happened within a year or two before his death in 2009, his career would have been over that day. But in 1969 there was room to maneuver and plot out a strategy. In this case, Ted and his spin doctors were helped by the Apollo moon landing and the country’s fascination with space exploration. But mostly we see the effect that the name Kennedy has in swaying public perception and marshalling defenders. It’s an early indicator of how the names Bush, Clinton, and Obama can steer opinion in these hyper-partisan times. Suffice it to say, if he were Ted Johnson and not Ted Kennedy he would have been toast. Instead he gets off with a slap on the writst, and goes on to have one of the longest senatorial careers in U.S. history, thus proving that his rewriting of history to paint himself as a victim worked.
So again, Chappaquiddick is not hero worship of the Kennedys like so many other movies made about the most famous family in political history. In the end, Ted selfishly gives up on his “true north”, his belief in what’s right, in order to do what’s convenient. Sounds like your standard everyday politician, doesn’t it? We hate those, don’t we? Chappaquiddick presents the Kennedys in a vastly different light than we’re accustomed to seeing, and probably won’t see again on the big screen for a long time.
A look back at all of our past pieces on Y: The Last Man will find a bunch of “It’s back on!!” or “It’s dead!” stories, because adapting Brian K. Vaughan’s classic comic book series has proven difficult. The long wait my finally be over now as Variety reports FX has ordered a pilot episode, with Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049) and Aida Mashaka Croal (Luke Cage) as showrunners. Melina Matsoukas (Master of None) will direct the pilot.
FX got involved in bringing the series to TV back in 2015, with Green coming aboard soon after. Vaughan will stay involved as an exec-producer, as well. Y: The Last Man was published by DC’s Vertigo Comics imprint from 2002-2008, encompassing 60 issues. It centered on amateur magician Yorick Brown, the last surviving male after a global plague wiped out every mammal with a Y chromosome. Along with his pet Capuchin monkey named Ampersand, a mysterious secret agent and a young geneticist, Yorick traverses an unfamiliar world looking for his lost love and answers for why he survived. Vaughn’s comic would skillfully explore politics, sex, and gender issues throughout its run.
Early on it looked like we would get a series of movies directed by DJ Caruso (Back when he was hot shit) and starring Shia LaBeouf (The same), then it was Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) planning a single movie that wouldn’t get off the ground, either. TV is probably the right way to go because Vaughn allowed himself multiple long storyarcs that could only be realized fully in a serialized format. One movie, or even three or four, couldn’t do Y: The Last Man justice. Now let’s hope FX gets this done and that they want to move forward on a season order.
Remember when Lucasfilm was hiding Solo: A Star Wars Story from us and we all thought it might be a disaster? How quickly things have changed, because Deadline now says the film may actually play at Cannes. Yeah, THAT Cannes, as in the film festival. Guess Lucasfilm showed us.
According to reports there will be a surprise screening of the Star Wars spinoff on May 15th, a week before its scheduled premiere on May 22nd in L.A. The fact that a major mainstream movie is playing at Cannes isn’t the shock here; we saw Mad Max: Fury Road play there a couple of years ago and the early buzz helped drive it to incredible acclaim and box office success. Perhaps Lucasfilm is looking to follow a similar template.
No matter how you look at it this is good news. This shows the amount of confidence Lucasfilm has in Ron Howard’s film since he took over, and we’re going to reactions to it earlier than expected. Solo: A Star Wars Story opens May 25th.
Last week, Arrow returned after a three-week hiatus in which Thea has to get involved in some League of Assassin business. Being Malcolm Merlyn’s daughter, AKA, the “daughter of the demon,” she had a target on her back from rival members of the secret guild. A splinter group called The Thanatos Guild needed Thea in order to unlock a secret location of a Lazarus Pit. While Thea (who has been MIA for most of this season) at first did not want to get involved with things, she agreed to honor her late father and teamed up with Nyssa al Ghul to help take on the Thanatos Guild. Thea and Nyssa end up leaving Star City to destroy the remaining Lazarus Pits to prevent the splinter group from gaining them. Meanwhile, Oliver realizes that he doesn’t want to hand the mantle of Green Arrow back to John Diggle. Although he briefly vacated the position to focus on his son, being forced back in the hood made him realize that he doesn’t want to stop, which can lead to a problem for him and John.
With the reveal of Diaz as this season’s true big baddie, Oliver is dealing with a different kind of criminal. Not a flamboyant magician like Damien Dahrk or the sophisticated Prometheus, Diaz is the Arrowverse’s answer to Marvel’s Kingpin. He plays in the shadows, gaining influence and power, until he’s ultimately “too big to fail.” First thought of as one of Cayden James’ henchmen, he ultimately was the true puppet master and now almost has everything within his grasp. Dinah realized that he didn’t have just “some” cops on his payroll, but even the police captain was doing his bidding. This makes trying to take him down very difficult for both the police as well as the vigilantes. Dinah decides that she will conduct a drug raid without informing the captain. She is even able to nab Anatoly in the bust as well. Anatoly knows that he won’t be in cuffs too long as both he and Diaz have an ace up their sleeve. Turns out, the District Attorney, the one who’s prosecuting Oliver as the Green Arrow, also is in Diaz’s pocket, and releases everyone arrested. Because those cops who arrested Anatoly did so without wearing vigilante masks, they now have targets on their backs, including the young cop that Curtis is currently dating.
Meanwhile, Oliver still hasn’t told Diggle that he doesn’t intend on giving up the hood as he wants to remain as the Green Arrow. Diggle knows something’s amiss, and even Felicity is pressuring Oliver to fess up and tell his best friend his true intentions. Oliver is hesitant, but he eventually does. He explains to Diggle that being the Green Arrow makes him feel whole and he wants to continue being the Green Arrow. Diggle seems fine with it, but it’s clear that this issue will not go away. As they try and bust a local drug dealer in Diaz’s organization in the hopes of getting Diaz, Diggle tries to go a little too far when interrogating the suspect. Oliver tries to reign him in, but the suspect is killed by another drug dealer just as he’s about to confess. Missing out on their lead, Oliver and Diggle have the first argument of the night. As Diggle goes off to let loose some steam, he goes to see his wife at ARGUS. As she knows him best, she proves to be a great counselor for him as well. He then realizes that he’s not mad because Oliver doesn’t want to stop being the Green Arrow, he’s mad because Oliver is the wrong person for the job at this point.
This is when the big argument between the two brothers in arms happens. Diggle and Oliver first attempt to hash out Diggle issue with him, but the two get very personal with each other. Diggle basically tells Oliver that everything he’s done this season has been making one bad decision after another. Him monitoring the other vigilantes was a mistake, as is him remaining to try to be a father, major, husband, and Green Arrow. As voices get raised between the two, the insults become more and more personal and rude. Diggle mentions that Oliver got his son’s mother killed, and Oliver mentions that Diggle killed his own brother. Some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even with best friends. The two engage in a huge fist fight in the Arrow Cave breaking things all over the place, as well as beating each other. Felicity, who just walked out of the room for a brief moment scolds the both of them as they briefly come to the senses as she tells them about a lead for Diaz’s drug lab.
Curtis and Dinah are keeping the few good cops with targets on their back in their warehouse safe when they are attacked by Diaz’s men. One of them happened to reveal where they were as he realized there was no better option than joining Diaz as he’s taken over all facets of the city. As the firefight goes off, Curtis is shot protecting the cop he’s dating. Lucky for him, he has his Mr. Terrific bulletproof suit on and his boyfriend realizes that he’s really a vigilante. Curtis, knowing that his husband left him for being a vigilante, as well as knowing that the cops don’t like vigilantes, is now fearful that he will lose his new boyfriend. At the same time, Oliver and Diggle are attacking the drug warehouse. While things aren’t 100% for them, they are still an effective team, and they are able to take the building down and destroy the drugs.
In the aftermath, Diggle realizes that he can no longer remain on Team Arrow as he tells Oliver that although he’s sorry for some of the things he said and that they came to blows, he’s not sorry about questioning Oliver’s leadership. As a result, Diggle leaves Team Arrow. Now, it’s just Oliver and Felicity. Oliver has managed to alienate everyone around him and now it’s just him. Felicity tells him that she isn’t going anywhere, but she might be next on the list unless he sees the error of his ways.
Although Oliver confronted the police captain and District Attorney about being under Diaz’s payroll and fired them, Diaz gets the last laugh. Before they left their office, the police captain fired Dinah and all the good cops on the force, so now the police are under Diaz’s control, also, the district attorney holds a press conference saying Oliver fired him to obstruct him for investigating Oliver as the Green Arrow. Now Oliver could face impeachment charges.
Next week, Oliver has to take on Diaz. Will he do it alone?
I’ve never been a hug fan of horror, but I’m even less a fan of going to horror movies. Most of the lame PG-13 horrors lack teeth, and are willing to simply invite the audience to chuckle and talk over the action. They’d rather make people laugh than scare them. It’s a way of controlling the crowd, but I much prefer the way John Krasinski does it with his nail-biting, suspenseful A Quiet Place, which had the audience too scared to make a sound.
Krasinski’s third film as a director and by far the best of his career, the story is told in near complete silence and with a bare minimum of dialogue. It makes for a nerve racking experience with every sound jolting you to attention. Set in a not too distant future after some global catastrophe, the story begins in upstate New York, or what remains of it. The surrounding area is now stalked by alien creatures that hunt based on sound, and apparently have wiped out the population before anybody realized what was going on.
Pulling double-duty as director and star, Krasinski is joined for the first time on camera by his wife Emily Blunt, and rising stars Noah Jupe (Wonder) and deaf actress Millicent Simmonds (Wonderstruck) as a family living in an isolated home. They exist in near complete silence, struggling every day not to make a sound that will attract the monsters to their door. That makes foraging for food and supplies a complicated risk, as we see in a tragic opening sequence that sets the bar for the high stakes involved. To make a noise is to die, which is why it’s good for them that they all know sign language.
Remaining quiet becomes more difficult by an increasingly dire set of circumstances. A deadly combination of deafness and adolescent rebellion have made the daughter a risky component, while the son shrinks at the responsibilities being placed upon him by his father. The most worrying scenario is the mother’s pregnancy, and with the due date closing in it’s unclear how they plan to keep a newborn child from screaming every five minutes.
At times it feels like there’s simply too much going on, there are so many dangers placed in the family’s path and they all come at once. But Krasinski, who rewrote a script penned by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, keeps the action split up into different focal point so they don’t overwhelm the viewer. He’s also grown into one Hell of a filmmaker, or perhaps he’s just found his footing with this particular genre. He keeps jump scares to a minimum, creating maximum effectiveness. He deploys sound like a master, freaking us out not with loud bangs but with deathly quiet in the face of terror. A brilliant stretch finds Blunt’s character suffering a grievous injury, and we watch as she strains to keep her pain inside so as not to invite a worse fate. As awful as the tiniest sound can be we’re also invited to recognize how beautiful certain sounds can be: the crashing of a waterfall, a child’s laugh, etc. When characters are actually allowed to speak it’s like all of the tension is, for a brief moment, let loose into the atmosphere.
Expressive performances by all four leads anchor the lean screenplay, necessary because sign language isn’t always the best way to communicate interpersonal relationships. The guilt and resentment tearing the family apart is as hazardous as an errant footstep. You won’t get all of your questions answered, especially if you need a greater sense of the outside world, but that would have unnecessarily increased the brisk 90-minute runtime. Besides, none of that stuff would matter as much as the story of this one family doing whatever they need to survive. A Quiet Place packs a lot of scares and technical precision, making for one of the best monster movies in recent years.
If ever there was a time to get your favorite Stephen King novel adapted into a movie or TV series it’s right now. The author’s works have never been more popular, and we’ve seen numerous studios attempting to strike while the iron is hot. Steven Spielberg has held the rights to King and Peter Straub’s 1984 book, The Talisman, for more than thirty years but a film has never been made. That may be about to change very soon, though.
King and Spielberg gave an interview with EW that saw The Talisman come up in discussion. King said, “Several times [Spielberg] came very close to making it, and there were a lot of discussions about that.” After which Spielberg chimed in with…
“I feel that in the very near future, that’s going to be our richest collaboration. Universal bought the book for me, so it wasn’t optioned. It was an outright sale of the book…I’ve owned the book since ’82, and I’m hoping to get this movie made in the next couple of years. I’m not committing to the project as a director, I’m just saying that it’s something that I’ve wanted to see come to theaters for the last 35 years.”
So Spielberg isn’t planning to direct it, that much is clear. He’s busy enough already with Indiana Jones 5, West Side Story, and a secret third movie. That means he would likely produce and hand the directing reins over to someone else. Maybe it’ll be New Mutants director Josh Boone, who was hired last year to work on The Talisman‘s screenplay? Boone is also attached to direct an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand.
We just don’t know, but I expect we’ll find out soon. Check out a synopsis for The Talisman below:
Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, is about to begin a most fantastic journey, an exalting, terrifying quest for the mystical Talisman—the only thing that can save Jack’s dying mother. But to reach his goal, Jack must make his way not only across the breadth of the United States but also through the wondrous and menacing parallel world of the Territories.
In the Territories, Jack finds another realm, where the air is so sweet and clear a man can smell a radish being pulled from the ground a mile away—and a life can be snuffed out instantly in the continuing struggle between good and evil. Here Jack discovers “Twinners,” reflections of the people he knows on earth—most notably Queen Laura, the Twinner of Jack’s own imperiled mother. As Jack “flips” between worlds, making his way westward toward the redemptive Talisman, a sequence of heart-stopping encounters challenges him at every step.
